CodeWeavers, the main sponsor/contributor to the Wine project, announced the release today of their commercial CrossOver 18.5 software for more easily running Windows games and applications on Linux and macOS.

If you live in the EU and have been wanting to explore IBM POWER hardware on Linux, a load of Tyan Habanero servers recently became available through a German retailer for 269 EUR (~$306 USD) that comes equipped with a 10-core POWER8 processor. While not POWER9, it's still an interesting Linux-capable beast and the price is unbeatable if you have been wanting to add POWER hardware to your collection. Phoronix reader Lauri Kasanen recently bought one of these IBM POWER servers at the 269 EUR price point and has shared thoughts on this server as well as some benchmarks. Here is Lauri's guest post checking out this low-cost 2U IBM server.

While Intel was building up anticipation for their Xe Graphics dedicated hardware last night in San Francisco with their inaugural "Odyssey" event, quietly hitting the Intel servers is an architecture overview for their Icelake "Gen 11" graphics.

The performance out of Intel's SVT video encoders for offering great CPU-based video encoding performance for the likes of HEVC / AV1 / VP9 continues maturing quite nicely. Since discovering Intel's open-source work at the start of February and benchmarking it several times since, its performance has continued to improve particularly for the SVT-AV1 encoder.

Last week NVIDIA announced the GeForce GTX 1660 as the newest RTX-less Turing GPU but costing only $219+ USD. The GTX 1660 is a further trimmed down version of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti that launched several weeks prior. After picking up an ASUS GeForce GTX 1660 Phoenix Edition, here are Linux OpenGL/Vulkan gaming benchmarks compared to a wide assortment of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards under Ubuntu.

For those using Samba as the open-source re-implementation of SMB/CIFS and allowing for file/print sharing with Microsoft Windows systems, Samba 4.10 is now available as the project's latest feature release.

With the core functionality for Intel Icelake CPUs appearing to be in place, Intel's open-source developers have been working on the other areas of hardware enablement for these next-generation processors.

While Vulkan 1.1.104 was just released on Sunday with new extensions ahead of this week's Game Developers Conference, today marks the availability of Vulkan 1.1.105 with new extensions for the "Google Games Platform", a.k.a. their just announced Stadia cloud game streaming platform.

Greenfield is the nearly two year old effort providing an in-browser, HTML5 Wayland compositor. This open-source project has allowed for remote Wayland applications to run in browsers while running from remote hosts. Greenfield though can now run applications directly inside a user's web browser via Web Worker threads.

Last week during Facebook's Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit, some interesting details were revealed by Intel and their work on this open-source hardware initialization effort alternative to proprietary BIOS/firmware.

One of the demos NVIDIA is showing off this week at their GPU Technology Conference is Quake II being path-traced using a Vulkan port of the game and adapted to handle VK_NV_ray_tracing functionality paired with the latest GeForce RTX GPUs.

The first beta of the Qt 5.13 tool-kit update is now available for testing. The Qt Company still hopes to ship Qt 5.13.0 in May and for that to happen they will be issuing multiple betas until they are ready for the release candidate phase.

Orbital is an open-source project providing a virtualization-based PlayStation 4 emulator that is still in its early stages but what interests us is its technical details including the use of Vulkan/SPIR-V.

While NetBSD has more than a half-dozen tier-one supported architectures and dozens more of tier two ports, DragonFlyBSD has been largely centered on x86_64 since their dropping of 32-bit x86 a while ago. Arm has largely remained off their radar but there seems to be some growing interest around seeing DragonFlyBSD on AArch64.

For demonstrating the many use-cases around the $99 Jetson Nano that was announced on Monday, NVIDIA engineers devised an open-source robot that you can build yourself with mostly 3D printed parts and by default is geared to run on Ubuntu Linux.

Announced on Monday was that the US Department of Energy in cooperation with Argonne National Laboratory will see the "Aurora" supercomputer as the first US Exascale SC coming online in 2021 and featuring Intel's highly anticipated Xe Graphics.

One of the most interesting announcements out of NVIDIA's 2019 GTC conference is the introduction of the Jetson Nano, NVIDIA's latest Arm developer board featuring a Tegra SoC. This developer board is very different from the past Jetson boards in that it's aiming for a very affordable price point: just $99 USD.

Last year we were expecting The Khronos Group to introduce OpenXR 1.0 for this standard to address fragmentation and provide interoperability in the VR space followed by AR. That debut last year didn't happen although they did show off the first demonstration at SIGGRAPH. This week though at GDC they are announcing the OpenXR 0.90 provisional specification release.

Not to be confused with Apple's Quartz graphics layer, a new open-source project called Quartz by developer Michał Siejak is producing stunningly beautiful results while being powered by the Vulkan graphics API, making use of Qt 3D, and NVIDIA RTX support within this path tracer.

The-Forge, a cross-platform rendering framework that is open-source and has supported Linux and Vulkan since 2016 and worked on a variety of interesting rendering features like more advanced "Tress-FX" support, rolled out two new releases this month.

Solus 4 has officially set sail as the latest version of this popular desktop Linux distribution that is known for its "Budgie" desktop environment, borrowing some performance optimizations from the likes of Clear Linux, and various usability enhancements and more to enhance its desktop experience.

It shouldn't come as any surprise, but landing today in Mesa 19.1 Git is the initial support for the Nouveau Gallium3D code to make use of the NIR intermediate representation as an alternative to Gallium's TGSI.

Linux game porter Ethan Lee has taken a break from his FNA-XNA/FAudio/Wine hacking to add support to the SDL2 library for the GameCube controller adapter intended for Nintendo's Wii U / Switch devices.

Paolo Bonzini submitted the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes for the Linux 5.1 kernel on Friday, much later in the cycle than normal. This isn't due to some big ticket features landing but rather "some ugly factors" in the form of tracking down some bugs and ended up dropping some premature optimizations.

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